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History, Politics, and Progress: Sylvia Plaths Hidden Narrative

Patrick OConnor
Even in Sylvia Plaths most distinctly personal poems there is a sense of alienation and anger with modern patterns of industrialism, capitalism, nuclear armament, and an oppressive social structure in the United States and Britain all of which seemed to discount human individuality as a necessary aspect of progress. Plath believed that the forces of modernization had given world leaders power for destruction that was real and universal. As she brought children into the world, she began to wonder if there was any point in trying to create life in a world so set on self-annihilation.1 One of the most publicized (and criticized) aspects of Plaths references to global events has been her use of Holocaust imagery. While numerous critics attack the appropriateness of Plaths Holocaust references, such criticisms have often failed to connect those metaphors to the poets greater worldview. The Holocaust became a powerful metaphor for her not only because of its immediate emotional significance, but because of the powerful connection Plath saw between its victims and her view of the future as it was being determined by world leaders. Before 1962, Plath had referenced the Holocaust only once in poetry, in her 1957 poem The Thin People. In the poem, the Holocaust remains a distant aspect of history always with us, but only in bad dreams and film (which makes the images seem, as the poems narrator says, unreal).2 The Thin People is spoken from the point of view of a character who is distant to the reality of the Holocaust, yet haunted by the seemingly inhuman images that do not obliterate/Themselves. In Ariel, however, Plath takes on an intense familiarity with the Holocaust no longer a remote American bystander, she becomes a direct witness and, at times, a victim. It is this familiarity that critics have taken issue with: Irving Howe believes that Plath was seemingly aware that the merely clinical cant provide the materials for a satisfying poem. He asserts that she enlarged the personal struggles she depicts by fancying

1 2

Sylvia Plath, "December 7, 1961," Letters Home, 438. Sylvia Plath, "The Thin People," The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 64.

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herself as a victim of a Nazi father [as in Daddy].3 It has also been said that Plath did not earn [the right to use the events], that she did not respect the real incommensurability to her own experience of what took place.4 The Ariel poem Getting There anticipates many of those criticisms. The speaker, traveling by train across the bloody record of history, across some war or other, witnesses Legs, arms piled outside/The tent of unending cries. This brutality is faceless it does not relate to any specific battle or war, but rather to all human instigated destruction. The witness brings a sense of futility to what she encounters as she attempts to bury a never-ending stream of bodies. That futility is compounded in the poems final lines: [I] Step to you from the black car of Lethe,/Pure as a baby.5 The black car of Lethe, a symbol of forgetfulness, implies that this baby will grow to blindly continue the process of destruction that has defined the narrators existence. Therefore, the pure baby that emerges at the end of the poem should not be taken as a symbol of hope, but rather as a reminder of the evils of the certainty of violence. Jacqueline Rose sees Getting There as self-defeating to Plaths drive to undo herself.6 While the horrors of the world make the speaker wish to shed her humanity (and her history), such an action can only work by means of the very forgetfulness whichensuresthat those horrors will be repeated.7 Getting There is a fitting testament to Cold War tension and industrialization. The world, having torn itself apart in each of the previous generations, seemed prepared to do it once more in 1962. However, there is another aspect of inhumanity in the poem that seems to mark Plaths late work. The train is Insane for destination, focused only on a victory in destruction. The men aboard who are not left to die are merely Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood/Into the next mile,/The next hour. Just as the speaker emerges Pure as a baby, blind to what has happened, these men come back repeatedly, as if the purpose for birth is the contribution of blood to the mission of some terrible brains/of Krupp. The image of Krupp steel cold, rigid, and industrial reinforces the dehumanization of the landscape. In Daddy, the line An engine, an
3 4

Irving Howe, The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, 232. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 205. 5 Sylvia Plath, "Getting There," The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 248. 6 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 148. 7 Ibid., 148

189 engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew, has a similar effect the engines are unstoppable industrial forces aimed at enhancing the efficiency of mass-death.8 The daddy character terrifies because he is a product of his environment, his neat mustache a symbol of inhuman perfection. Characters defined by this soulless efficiency appear in a number of poems Plath composed during the final months of her life. Shortly before that time, the explicit details surrounding the indoctrination of Hitlers army, and the efficiency with which it ran, became known following the trial of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. Eichmanns responses during the trial revealed his inability for independent thought, for which he apologized, saying Officialese is my only language.9 Such indoctrination was crucial for the smooth running of the Nazi genocide machine killing was no longer the act of ending a life, but a final solution, evacuationand special treatment. It served to maintain order and sanity in the various widely diversified branches of the Nazi regime, whose co-operation was essential in this matter.10 Plath saw the official language of the authorities that governed her life - the British and (especially) American governments as similarly dehumanizing. As Al Strangeways has illustrated, Plath emphasized the following passage in her copy of Erich Fromms Escape from Freedom: Never have words been more misused in order to conceal truth than today. Betrayal of allies is called appeasement, military aggression is camouflaged as defense against attack.11 In her 1962 essay Context, Plath asserts that such language abstract doubletalk of peace or implacable foes, was a weak disguise for policies that she believed threatened global security in a quest for hegemony.12 Even as a high school student, Plath was aware of the self-destructive powers of militaristic policies within her own government. A 1950 article by Plath and classmate Perry Norton for the Christian Science Monitor expresses outrage at the American government and the Atomic Energy Commission over the continued production of the
Sylvia Plath, Daddy, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 222. Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics, 186. 10 Al Strangeways, ""The Boot in the Face": the Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath," Contemporary Literature, 374-375. 11 Al Strangeways, ""The Boot in the Face": the Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath," Contemporary Literature, 375. 12 Sylvia Plath, "Context," Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, 65.
9 8

Plath Profiles hydrogen bomb. The article questions the paradox of building weapons to enforce peace and decries the arms race as futile. The young writers suggest that instead of

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focusing on a race toward mutual assured destruction, leaders should redirect their energy towards young men and women who are essentially idealistic and believe firmly in world peace.13 Plaths letters from 1960-61 express similar frustrations and fears. In a December 1961 letter to her mother, Plath discusses her reaction to an article in The Nation entitled Juggernaut: The Warfare State, which frightened her so much that she couldnt sleep for nights.14 The article was one of many on the self-destructive nature of the arms race, and was part of the growing pool of information serving to expand Western consciousness on the dangers of nuclear war in the early 1960s. Days before that consciousness exploded into worldwide terror with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Plath wrote Fever 103,15 her only poem that specifically mentions the bombing of Hiroshima. Here, radiation and the yellow sullen smokes of a hellish postfallout landscape choke the aged and the meek,/The weak/Hothouse baby in its crib, and attach themselves, like Hiroshima ash to sinners. Similar to Getting There, Plath explores the idea of attaining purity through annihilation. The fever does not cease once its original function has been completed. It rolls across the landscape, choking with heat not only the aged and the meek and infants in cribs, but the hope of the next generation (if one is to exist), which has been left no record of the past. It is only reasonable, therefore, to predict that the process of fever and self-destruction will trundle around the globe to envelop the landscape again in future generations.16 By referencing events as immediate and relevant as Hiroshima or the Holocaust, one could assert that Plath was violating her claim in Context that her poems were not about the terrors of mass extinction, or headlines, but rather relevant for all times. However, Plath succeeds in achieving the delicate balance an artist must maintain when alluding to world events. The Ariel poems do, as Plath says, grow out of something closer to the bone than a general, shifting philanthropy, and certainly could not be considered religious or political propaganda. Were it not for the artfulness and power
13 14

Sylvia Plath and Perry Norton, "Letter to the Editor, Christian Science Monitor, 3/16/1950. Sylvia Plath, "December 7, 1961," Letters Home, 437-438. 15 Sylvia Plath, Fever 103, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 231-232. 16 Ibid., 231

191 of the work, surely whatever statement Plath intended for her readers would have been lost. Plath was a poet and not a journalist, something she demands the reader understand of all poets in Context. However, the statements made in Ariel on the male-dominated, autocratic authorities who controlled the fate of society have come to be seen as one of the critical aspects of the collection.17 Throughout Ariel, Plath channels her anger over the extreme concentration and paternalistic nature of world power. Daddy could be read as an invective against not just a father figure, but the entire male-dominated system of power, while Lady Lazarus is Plaths warning against these pillars of authority: no longer will she suffer their injustices. She will rise out of whatever remains are left in their destructive wake and eat men like air.18 Plath uses the same sense of fury through the Second Voice of the radio play Three Women.19 The Second Voice is that of a woman who has suffered a miscarriage and lashes out against not just a small fraternity that conspires against women, but all men. Men surround the Second Voice constantly and exhibit the inhuman characteristics that Plath observed in world leaders. They patronize her - the womans boss, seeing her distraught appearance, laughs and asks, Have you seen something awful?/You are so white, suddenly. The boss question is an example of the same doubletalk Plath had decried in high school and in Context. It is meaningless the boss expects no answer besides affirmation that the woman is, indeed, fine. She describes her boss and the swarming packs of disengaged men who surround her as flat. From their flatness, destructions,/ Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed. They are jealous gods, who would have the whole world flat because they are. Flatness becomes every overpowering, omnipresent force of modernization that compromises humanity. It becomes the wasted corpses outside of the train in Getting There, and the yellow sullen smokes of Fever 103. The bulldozers roll out emotions and passions until the world exists to serve the needs of these careless men. The Second Voice struggles to resist the power of the jealous gods. While she does not quite understand where their flatness comes from, she recognizes it as something...like
17 18

Sylvia Plath, "Context," Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, 65. Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus," The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 244. 19 Sylvia Plath, Three Women, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 176.

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cardboard. Cardboard, a relatively new innovation during Plaths lifetime, acts both as a symbol of modernity and the source of male power. As the Second Voice wonders why her natural body cannot conceive a face, a mouth, as it has been made to, she sits dazed, ordering Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples components symbolic of modernity. Her body is transitioning from its original intent, the production of life, into its new purpose, the production of technology, to feed industry and to satisfy her cardboard bosses. While Leaves and petals attend the First Voice of Three Women, who has successfully given birth, the Second Voice hears Trains roar in [her] ears, and she watches as the silver track of time empties into the distance. She is found wanting, as the sound of her feet now resembles mechanical echoes and the Tap, tap, tap of steel pegs. The Second Voice is a metaphor for humanitys destination in a society that focuses so strongly on industrial progress and loses touch with its fundamental nature. She is the predecessor of the voice in Getting There. They stand on opposite ends of the track of time one suffering the slow transition from humanity to mechanization, the other staring back at the wasteland left in the wake of progress. Because so much of the Western world, especially the United States, believed total destruction not only assured but imminent, many began planning for survival in a post-apocalyptic world. In the U.S, an industry of protection for families in the event of nuclear attack played on the fears of the population. In the same 1961 letter she wrote discussing Juggernaut: The Warfare State, she mentions that one of the most distressing featuresis the public announcements of Americans arming against each other the citizens of Nevada announcing they will turn out bombed and ill people from Los Angeles into the desertand ministers and priests preaching that it is all right to shoot neighbors who try to come into ones bomb shelters.20 It seemed that in America, citizens were not waiting for a disaster to turn on one another. Plath was aware of the restrictive forces surrounding society at the time of her writing and understood the possibility that events as, or likely more, devastating than those of World War II could occur during her lifetime. Her poetic references to suicide, therefore, can often be seen as declarations of freedom from modernity and restrictive
20

Sylvia Plath, "December 7, 1961," Letters Home, 438.

193 cultural forces. Death, for Plath, is a right, a choice of the body, a symbol of independence. Lady Lazarus is the most overt example of this: the narrators enemy believes that he holds her identity, her nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth the scars of his power. She rebukes his pride those parts of her body that show the suffering Will vanish in a day, and with them his power, his influence, and she will be a smiling woman. Although the peanut-crunching crowd gazes at the devastation of her identity for their entertainment, she remains Nevertheless...the same, identical woman. Her source of strength is the knowledge that for her, Dying/Is an art, like everything else. It is an art for the natural woman who repels the mechanized death of warfare, the utter facelessness of genocide, and who proves to a Nazi that dying is not a process of industrialization. Plath presents self-destruction as the result of continual submission. Lady Lazarus has presumably suffered through each of her three lives and plotted endlessly on how best to rob back the humanity that was stolen from her. If Lady Lazarus is this womans final statement of defiance, then Cut is the initiation of her catharsis.21 The speaker suffers a partially severed thumb, attached only by a sort of hinge/Of skin, after slipping while chopping onions. In the midst of an activity that could be considered a symbolic act of female servitude, she is stunned by the vision of blood flowing from her wound, awakened to her bodys sensitivity and the realization that she is alive. It is the woman in Cut who, after dwelling on how, Out of a gap in her flesh A million soldiers run,/Redcoats, every one, begins to see the power she wields in claiming the right to destroy her own body out of passion and not methodic extermination. As a political statement, however, suicide is certainly a dubious option. Edge,22 perhaps the last poem Plath wrote, declares that The woman is perfected only once her body has died. Perfection, however, remains a toxic goal in The Munich Mannequins, perfection is terrible because it cannot have children. The dead woman of Edge, who wears the smile of accomplishment, likewise can no longer reproduce. She coils her dead children into her, One at each little/Pitcher of milk, now empty. The children have avoided faceless death, have maintained their identity, and

21 22

Sylvia Plath, Cut, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 235. Sylvia Plath, Edge, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 272.

Plath Profiles have not died alone, but they also have failed to develop their own identities and exist apart from their mother. Therefore, it is necessary to remember that Plath does not proclaim her natural independence from the mechanized world only in her poems dealing with self-

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destruction. In fact, it is her poems dealing with birth and children that provide Plaths clearest voice against the patterns of 20th century history and politics. The language of the baby poems demonstrates that Plath believed, as she wrote in Context that making in all its forms, and especially the making of life, was the real issue of every time.23 In a 1960 letter, Plath states: The whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriageFrieda is my answer to the H-bomb.24 Robin Peel believes that [c]hildren are the catalyst in Plaths politicization. Through looking at their world, she experienced the need to look beyond her own.25 Nick and the Candlestick,26 which Plath began during the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 24, 1962 and finished five days later, is her poetic answer to not only the H-bomb, but to the forces that brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. The poems speaker marvels at the appearance of a child Nick whom she refers to as love, in a frozen sub-terra world of icicles, Black bat airs, and Waxy stalactites. The narrator tells Nick The pain/You wake to is not yours. With his appearance, he brings the novelty of innocence into the world. He remains a clean slate, just as the child in Getting There, but Plath separates the two, stating that Nick is the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious. He is not a product of the black car of Lethe, but a savior, a baby in the barn, who will bear the burden of suffering so future generations will not forget it. Two poems from 1963 Child and Kindness reinforce Plaths belief in the power of new life. In Child, she marvels at the clear eye of an infant, the one absolutely beautiful thing. She does not call it perfect because even in its beauty,

23 24

Sylvia Plath, "Context," Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, 65. Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics, 173. 25 Ibid., 194. 26 Sylvia Plath, Nick and the Candlestick, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 240.

195 there is room within it to be filled with color and ducks,/The zoo of the new27 Plath wonders in Kindness what could be so real as the cry of a child?/A rabbits cry may be wilder/But it has no soul. 28 These poems reinforce Plaths belief that perfection is a dubious title and that progress can never achieve the power of natural life. The prospect of hope in an infant the clean slate child, who waits to be filled with both the horrors of history and the zoo of the new, is a reminder of possibilities beyond perfection, beyond our material accomplishments, and beyond the horrors of history.

27 28

Sylvia Plath, Child, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 265. Sylvia Plath, Kindness, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 269.

Plath Profiles Works Cited

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Howe, Irving. "The Plath Celebration: a Partial Dissent." Sylvia Plath: the Woman and the Work. Ed. Edward Butscher. New York: Dodd and Mead, 1977. 225-235. Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. United States: Rosemont and Printing, 2002. Plath, Sylvia, and Perry Norton. "Letter to the Editor." Christian Science Monitor 16 Mar. 1950. Plath, Sylvia. "The Applicant." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 221-222. Plath, Sylvia. "April 21, 1960." Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia Plath. New York: HarperPerennial, 1975. 377-379. Plath, Sylvia. "Context." Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. 65-66. Plath, Sylvia. "Child." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 265. Plath, Sylvia. "Cut." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 235-236. Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 222-224. Plath, Sylvia. "December 7, 1961." Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia Plath. New York: HarperPerennial, 1975. 437-439. Plath, Sylvia. "Edge." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 272-273. Plath, Sylvia. "Fever 103." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 231-232. Plath, Sylvia. "Getting There." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 247-249. Plath, Sylvia. "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams." Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. 156-172.

197 Plath, Sylvia. "Kindness." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 269-270. Plath, Sylvia. "Lady Lazarus." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 244-247. Plath, Sylvia. "The Munich Mannequins." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 262-263. Plath, Sylvia. "Nick and the Candlestick." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 240-242. Plath, Sylvia. "Thalidomide." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 252. Plath, Sylvia. "The Thin People." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. 64-65. Plath, Sylvia. "Three Women." The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1981. 176-187. Plath, Sylvia. "The Wishing Box." Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. 213-220. Plath, Sylvia. "October 30, 1961." Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia Plath. New York: HarperPerennial, 1975. 434. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago P, 1991. Strangeways, Al. ""The Boot in the Face": the Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 370-390.